I tend to believe in fate; that the things that happen were meant to.
Maybe it’s less about believing every moment of our lives has been prewritten and more about considering all the tiny decisions that have to align for a moment to happen at all. You leave the house five minutes later than you planned. You miss one train and catch the next. You choose one car out of ten and stand instead of sit. Someone else, living an entirely separate life, makes their own series of seemingly insignificant decisions, and somehow, for a few minutes, your timelines intersect. Change one decision, one delay, one turn, and you might never meet at all.
I especially believe it when it comes to the people you meet. Let’s go over the stats again: there are what, 8 billion people in the world? So imagine that out of all of those people, there is someone getting on the exact train as you are, at the exact time, and standing in the perfect place for the two of you to exchange glances? Or what about the person next to you at the same grocery store, shopping for peaches at the same time as you? Sure it’s stone fruit season but does that completely negate the magical overlap? I think not.
Now I don’t know about you, but I’m a conversation starter. I hear so much discourse and hate about small talk but personally I love it. I see small talk as conversational foreplay, or at the very least, an exercise of the wonderful ability we as humans have to converse and connect on the grandest or most mundane things.
Almost every profound conversation with someone you don’t know has to begin superficially. Nobody approaches a stranger and immediately asks about their childhood wounds, greatest fear, or conception of God. We start with their shoes, or the weather, or their hair. Whatever your nerve-wracked mind thinks up before the fear of sparking conversation stops you.
Last week I was in New York w a friend of mine, and I was reminded just how strange the tendency to spark conversation has become. I had just said goodbye to a woman whose shoes I’d loved, and had said so, when he told me how baffled and almost embarrassed he is each time I start small talk w someone on the train. He tells me that “People here don’t really do that,” to which I rebuttal: How do you make friends then? How do you connect? Must every person you know already be vetted by the commonality of a mutual friend, a workplace, or gosh forbid, an APP.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have institutionalized connection. Our friends come through other friends, our professional connections through work or LinkedIn, and increasingly, our romantic connections through dating apps. There’s almost an expectation that a stranger needs some kind of preexisting reason to speak to you. But when did a stranger stop being a potential person in our lives and become someone we’re supposed to leave alone? Of course, not everyone wants to be approached, and no one owes a stranger their attention. But I wonder if in our effort not to bother one another, we’ve also eliminated some of our opportunities to thrill one another. There has to be some space between respecting someone’s solitude and treating every person we don’t know as permanently off limits.
I credit more than my midwest roots for my tendency to spark conversation. Like anything, it takes practice. One of my favorite things to do is go on solo dates during which I make the most connections. Casual conversation to pass the time- -in line, while standing beside one another at a rack of thrifted blouses, or (especially so) with the service workers of the establishments you frequent- -only makes sense, right? Think about it, none of us would exist if it weren’t for connections like these.
For most of human history, meeting someone relied heavily on proximity, community, timing, introductions, courage, and chance. Our parents, grandparents, and every generation before them had no catalog of thousands of people to sort through first. The idea that we should be able to filter potential partners by age, height, education, politics, religion, hobbies, drinking habits, and whether they’re “looking for something serious” before ever hearing the sound of their voice is, historically speaking, pretty bizarre. Dating apps supposedly give us more possibilities, but in doing so, they also give us more ways to eliminate them. Someone you could fall madly for after meeting in a bookstore might be someone you would have swiped left on in three seconds.
Our lineage relied upon these happenstance meetings that are meeting their demise due to their online counterparts. With the deep pool of potential matches right at our fingertips, why build up the courage to say hello to someone in person? Making connections in person is dying so much that we’ve become newly fascinated with the “meetcute” because app-based introductions have made spontaneous meetings feel rarer. This is only supported by the grand sigh of a person before they tell you they met their significant other on an APP. They say it with such shame, and although I don’t believe in shame as a precursor to positive change, I don’t think it’s necessarily misplaced here.
Isn’t the commonality of being in the exact same place, at the exact same time, then on top of that, feeling a spark, enough to connect?
When I say “feeling a spark” I know you know, or I hope you know what I’m talking about. That inexplicable but absolutely palpable pull you have towards someone for some indiscriminate reason. It’s like describing love- -it comes in all different forms for all different reasons, but when you feel it, you know. Now tell me sincerely that you’ve felt this same drop-of-the-heart, chest-tightening, craving sensation while looking at a 2x2 (probably inaccurate) photo of someone. “Probably inaccurate” not because the photo doesn’t look like them (though sometimes this is also the case) but because yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but by comparison, feeling someone’s presence in person then equates to a novel’s worth of complex novelty.
I will say, my hands are not clean when it comes to this! I’ve been a victim of the apps, but it’s why I want to shout from the rooftops what I’ve learned since being off of them. I’ve been clean of online dating for 8 months, and I don’t plan on ever returning. The conclusion I’ve come to that’s keeping me far from them is that fate doesn’t know the apps. Fate will use its magic and send two people to the store at the same time, looking for an item in the same section, and let the hanger hooks of two people tangle together just long enough for them to sustain the eye contact they couldn’t before (a true story of my own meetcute a few months back). Fate will play little games and make the beating of your heart and the butterflies in your chest feel nearly too strong to say hello. It will plant questions in your mind like “were they really looking at me?” “are they single” “do they think I’m cute?” Yes these questions are a whirlwind and can build up to what might feel like fear in the moment, but I love to try and build up the courage to push past that fear and just start the conversation.
After all, fate isn’t on the apps. So taste the sweetness of the unknown and start the conversation. And if that’s too much, then try giving them a kiss.
xo,
A. Song
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